Decembering, remembering that Christmas is part of December, not the other way around. This year I'm celebrating December, which includes Christmas. It includes Hanukkah as well, which is also not part of Christmas.

'Life was richer then," one of my cousins said Friday night. We were talking at her mother's wake, and she was, not surprisingly, looking back. She thought the '50s and '60s were "richer" than the world we live in today.

Two hours into my journey home last Friday from New Melleray Abbey, a 166-year-old monastery, representing the 900-year-old Trappist Cistercian contemplative order, I was feeling spiritually and physically refreshed.

If you want to know which Oak Parkers fought — and died — in World War I, you can read the names on the bronze tablets of the Scoville Park War Memorial, aka Peace Triumphant (if you can get the kids who sit and crawl on them to move out of the way).

Sarah Coglianese had a lot going for her. The Oak Park and River Forest High School grad (class of 1996) moved to San Francisco after college and found work in the publishing field. She lived in New York for four years, where she met her husband, Rob, and when she got pregnant, they moved back to San Francisco, where he found a job with Twitter.

Dorothy Parker once observed, "There are two kinds of people — those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." With that cautionary bit of wit in place, as a rhetorical exercise I ask the following:

The latest massacre in a mind-numbing succession of mass shootings, took place at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon last Thursday. Nine dead. More injured. It was all over the news as we worked on the latest draft of a mission statement for our Gun Responsibility Advocates meeting that evening, which states:

Oak Park River Forest Community Foundation has a part-time job position open for a Donor and Grant Services Coordinator. The position will support the administration and management of the Foundation’s grant and scholarship programs and donor...